I understand that for many of you this is a stretch, but if you could just bear with me a moment hopefully this will all make sense. So many times in the process of cheese making you try something new; a new move; or a new culture; or a new temperature; but it’s all little stuff.
You must only change one thing at a time; and you must be really patient about watching what happens with that change. The shift of 1 or 2 degrees in your cooking temperature; or the amount of culture that you add by 5%; if you change both of these at the same time, you’ve kind of screwed up because you don’t understand the impact of which change resulted in which result. Every batch is a new play.
Over and over, you try and perfect the cheese. Over and over and over. And Saturdays are the worst. You need to get up pretty early in the morning and drive into that big city down the road and justify your product. It’s just like a media scrum. Why didn’t you play the forward pass in the third quarter; why isn’t Tom Brody on the field, why is the rind too thick; why is the texture less smooth then last week. You start this media blitz at 5:00 a.m. and by 2:00 in the afternoon you are feeling weary, and worn out and just want to go home. But by the next morning you need to understand what would happen if you cooked your curd a little longer, and maybe at a different temperature, and maybe if you washed your cheese with grappa instead of just salted whey then maybe...
So you drag your sorry ass out of bed and into the dairy because you haven’t nailed it yet. You haven’t won that damn SuperBowl. You haven’t created perfect. So off you go again.
Now the most exciting part of a football game is the Hail Mary and Monforte has thrown out it’s pass and it’s been picked up and run into the end zone by Tom Melanson. Monforte is thrilled today to be able to say that we now officially have a home in Stratford and a building that will be started in June of this year. Maybe before this if Tom has his way, and Lord knows I wouldn’t want to bet on that one.
Monforte’s new facility will be built at 211 Lorne Ave. and we will start production as soon as the milk starts to run in 2010. In the meantime, as soon as the dairy is built we are anticipating a school for cheesemaking that helps people understand what all those little changes mean. How they impact quality and food safety. How we can create cheese of European quality here in Canada. How we can do all of that in an appropriate manner that sustains farming and creates art in our community.
The most important thing I can say today is thank you to Perth Community Futures. This morning I had four meetings with different banks, including leftwing, government-supported institutions as well as conventional banks and credit unions, only to be told by each and every one of them that my debt-to-equity ratio was not appropriate and even with the offer of my pregnant Clydesdale I didn’t have enough security against my business. This with five years of sound financials.
All I can say is thank heavens for grass roots movements like CSA’s and Perth Community Futures.
Without PCF there would be no Monforte. There wouldn’t be the income stream there is for 20 farmers; there wouldn’t be the hope of a cheesemaking school and there certainly wouldn’t be the need to get out of bed and try to make that blessed cheese yet again.
Now my dad is a pretty conservative kind of guy; he’s actually a really conservative kind of Mennonite guy, so when I told him I needed to name my new dairy the Hail Mary Dairy he said that seemed pretty religious; not in an Anabaptist kind of way; and I said to him Dad, no honest it’s just about football; but you know on reflection I’m not so so sure.
Thank you so much for giving me the reason to get up in the morning.